Best Managers Ever – Part 2

Yesterday I started my top three in terms of managers that have inspired me to become the best manager I can be, and I spoke about a manager who showed me how to take time to explain yourself to get buy-in from employees.

Today I want to share with you Manager 2 – someone I worked with for only a year, whilst covering a maternity leave. And to be fair, by the time I came across this particular manager, I was already almost twenty years into my career (ouch – has it really been that long!) so I’d seen a lot of different managers, all with their own particular mix of quirks.

Manager 2 kind of crept into my list gradually, but that’s one of the reasons I want to share the experience with you. So if you come across someone like this, you give them the time to demonstrate how good they are.

When I first started at the contract, I heard very quickly through the office grapevine that my new manager was ‘into meetings’. And sure enough, once I’d had all the introductions and training, I started getting regular meeting invites. Weekly catch-up meetings, finance team meetings, project meetings…you get the idea. And I have to admit, when I was up to my neck in reviews, making time for yet another meeting was more than a little annoying.

But here’s the thing – there wasn’t a single meeting he held that didn’t give me something useful to work on or feed back to my team. And I realised that he wasn’t holding meetings just for the sake of holding meetings, looking busy or to validate his role, which I admit was my initial impression. He was making sure we had time to catch up, so he could share knowledge with me, that I then needed to share with my team. He was forcing me to make time to take note of what I’d achieved, what I needed to work on, what I needed to share with my team or what I needed to think about.

So thank you Manager 2 – for showing me that sometimes it takes time to see the benefits of something (and for the hats – you always wore such interesting hats!).